Jamal Mazrui wrote:
> Certainly, Ruby performance is not always a problem.
>
We agree on this point, completely.
> Quantifying it more than that is difficult, and should not be
> necessary for it to be acknowledged as a valid concern.
>
Translation "I'm too lazy to quantify it more than that."
Which is not our problem. IF you took the time to study
application performance, and the specific areas where Ruby's
performance is perfectly fine, you'd be able to carry on
a much better argument. As it is, you admit you don't have the
patience to do that.
I however am not so constrained. In fact, I'm a bit obsessed
with benchmarking any new language I run into. I fully
expected Ruby to be a lot slower because of statements
like yours. What I found after fairly exhaustive benchmarking,
however, was quite illuminating.
Ruby does very well against both Perl and Python in many
benchmarks. It does indeed fall behind in a few areas. But I was
both surprised and pleased to see that it keeps up very well
where it counts.
In fact, I was very surprised to find that it even beats Java(!)
in some benchmarks, most notable are math with BigNumbers
and some regular expression parsing. Both features with a
wide range of applicable problem domains.
Would it be great to have a p-code or other compiled version
of Ruby? You bet. Does that mean Ruby has performance issues
making it inappropriate for professional development? Not at
all.
I'm afraid that after 20+ years of software development, I've
learned that the time to create the program is usually
more important the the final performance of the program. This
is NOT always true. Certainly not for things like video games.
However, I have also learned that by the time you get around
to squeezing every last drop of performance from a language,
the hardware people triple the speed of the platform, and the
performance problems are suddenly less important.
Note, I'm not saying your points are invalid. I'm just saying that
you won't convince anyone here with statements like
"Quantifying it more than that is difficult," when it is actually
quite easy.